Retailers, wholesalers, and other product distributors typically maintain an inventory of various items that may be ordered, leased, borrowed, rented, viewed, and so forth, by clients or customers. For example, an e-commerce website may maintain inventory in a fulfillment center. When a customer orders an item, the item is picked from inventory, routed to a packing station, packed, and shipped to the customer. In some cases, an associate may manually place an item(s) in a staging area as part of a production distribution workflow. For example, the staging area can include locations for holding pre-assembled customer orders before the orders are delivered to the customer.
In some cases, a retailer (or product distributors) can use a radio frequency identification (RFID) system to track items in a staging area. In these RFID systems, an RFID tag can be disposed on an item and programmed with information identifying the associated item. RFID systems can attempt to locate the item in the staging area based on reading the identifying information from the RFID tag. RFID systems typically require an associate to manually place the RFID tag on the item and associate the RFID tag with the item (e.g., by scanning a barcode on the item) before placing the item in the staging area. Moreover, once an associate places the item in its destination location, conventional RFID systems may again require the associate to enter information associated with the destination location (e.g., by scanning a barcode associated with a particular location in the staging area). Each of these manual transactions can impact the properties of an RFID tag, which in turn, can affect the accuracy of tracking a given item that includes the RFID tag.